Rob Neyer

Verified.

London Underground station flooding has reportedly been reduced by around 90% thanks to a group of engineers: beavers. After conservationists reintroduced a family of beavers into a nearby city park, the animals built dams and restored wetlands that now absorb and slow floodwater naturally. Authorities had planned major man-made flood infrastructure, but the beavers effectively created their own system — while also boosting biodiversity and restoring the ecosystem around them.

South Korea has built more wildlife crossings over highways than any other country per mile of road. Vehicle-wildlife collisions on highways with overpasses have dropped by over 90%. The cost-benefit is there. We need 10,000+ more.

If Ebola becomes a pandemic, it will be in no small part because millions of people now view public health measures as oppression rather than the most basic infrastructure of a functioning and sustainable civilization.

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. When they stop, something dangerous is nearby. When they continue, the coast is clear. This wiring predates primates. These kids are being sedated by the oldest safety signal in the mammalian nervous system. The Max Planck Institute tested this in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong reduced anxiety and paranoia with medium effect sizes. Six minutes of traffic noise increased depression by the same margin. The effect worked on people who had never left dense urban environments. Their bodies responded to a signal their conscious minds had never learned. King's College London ran a larger study. 1,292 participants, real-time mood tracking through a phone app, 26,856 assessments over three years. Hearing or seeing birds improved mental wellbeing for up to eight hours afterward. The effect held for people diagnosed with depression. Trees, plants, and waterways didn't explain it. The birds themselves were the variable. Now here's where Italy connects to Finland. 95% of parents in the Finnish city of Oulu let their babies nap outside starting at two weeks old. A 2008 study confirmed the children took longer, deeper naps outdoors. Parents reported letting them sleep in temperatures as low as -15°C. 66% said their babies were more active afterward compared to indoor naps. The practice started as a public health initiative from Nordic maternity clinics in the early 1900s and became cultural infrastructure. The Italian kindergarten in this video is running the same program the Nordic countries have been running for a century. Outdoor naps, natural soundscapes, no white noise machines, no blackout curtains. Meanwhile, American kindergartens have been eliminating nap time entirely to squeeze in more instruction. A UMass study showed that children who skipped naps forgot 12% of what they learned that morning. The nap itself was the learning. The irony is that the countries spending the least on sleep technology for children are producing the best sleep outcomes. No sound machines. No apps. Just birds.

Why is someone who throws 85-87 playing summer ball? Probably because outside of 3 conferences of D1 baseball your odds as a player of being selected are less than .001% and the guys are enjoying the last bit of the kids game they have left before life takes over.

no actually Disney needs to mandate that, in order to work on a Star Wars project, you need to have seen every Kurosawa film, the entire Budd Boetticher Ranown Cycle, and all three Flash Gordon serials from 1936-1940

North Carolina is the only place on Earth where Venus flytraps grow wild. The entire global wild population lives in a roughly 90-mile radius around Wilmington, in the longleaf pine bogs of the coastal plain and sandhills. The soil there is so nutrient-poor that the plant evolved to eat insects to survive. It took millions of years to perfect the trap, and you can buy one at the hardware store for $7. Poachers know this. They drive into the bogs at night and rip thousands of flytraps out of the ground. Some get sold into the houseplant trade. Others get smuggled overseas. North Carolina made flytrap poaching a felony in 2014, but people still do it. But NC is also doing something most states don't: funding plant conservation through a specialty license plate. In July 2024, Governor Cooper signed the "Home of the Venus Flytrap" plate into law. It costs $30 a year. $20 of that goes directly to the North Carolina Botanical Garden Foundation, which uses the money for seed banking, genetic research, tribal conservation partnerships, and native landscape restoration across the state. If you're a North Carolina driver, this is one of the cheapest, most concrete pro-conservation actions available to you. You're funding the science protecting a species that exists nowhere else on Earth, every time you renew your registration. If you're not in NC, you can donate to the North Carolina Botanical Garden Foundation directly.

I was the first person born in Alaska to represent Alaska in the U.S. House of Representatives!

Octopuses are highly intelligent animals with 9(!) distributed brains. But they never evolved into a dominant species primarily because they are born orphans and don't recieve any knowledge from family. The father dies after mating and the mother dies after the eggs hatch.

"Just nine percent of independent studies drew positive conclusions about the health impacts of meat – compared to 69 percent of those with industry links."

half of the comments and qts on this perfectly reasonable proposal are people going “if they’re cheap people should buy them themselves, why should i care?”, completely missing that they are already paying for the consequences of elderly bathroom falls

Hot take: A larger share of today's parents are raising children they wanted, waited for, and planned for, and they're calmer, better parents because of it.

The incredible @larryWilmore joins us and @danielvankirk in @dumbpeopletown today as we dig into a classic Reddit “Am I The Asshole” story. It all starts with a mom who liked to nap in her son and his wife’s bed. Listen to the full episode wherever you get pods or watch on YT

Before European colonization, this was one of the most productive & biodiverse ecosystems on Earth. Acorns, grapes, berries, tubers, pine nuts, fish, waterfowl, elk & much more were regeneratively produced & harvested w/o any irrigation pumps, synthetic inputs, or fossil fuels

Something inspiring to me how you can take an old naval air station and turn it back into a wetlands full of beavers and birds and it doesn’t even take thaaaat long

Insane stat of the day: California almonds use roughly 3–5.5 million acre-feet of water per year, depending on methodology. That's ~4-7x more water than all data centers in North America used combined in 2025.

Environmental litigation often pays better than actually solving conservation problems. Enviro groups passed on buying an Oregon old-growth forest, then spent *more* suing over it than the land would've cost, and got worse conservation outcomes.

Interesting idea, maybe we could test it by creating a Department that focuses on Government Efficiency and give a tech billionaire broad purview to hire people to attempt this. Surely they'd cut more than .01% of the federal budget, right?

Before the near-total eradication of the American Chestnut, some preachers in Appalachia railed against the tree as being uniquely "sinful" because it encouraged sloth; the free & easy abundance of the nuts meant that many chose to stop working for wages during chestnut season.

Huh. Weird!